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Getting divorced, particularly when children are involved, can be a hard and messy business, rife with mediators, lawyers and courts. It’s little remarked how hard the realities of the situation can be afterward, when people are on their own.

“I came from a family that had a horrible divorce, and when it came time for me, I thought it would be different,” said Sheri Atwood, a 35-year-old mother of a 10-year-old girl. “But managing child support payments, child care, pickup schedules, figuring out who will pay for this and that. You’ve got an Excel spreadsheet out all the time, and you’re still swamped.”

Seeking relief, and seeing a potentially unserved market, two years ago Ms. Atwood quit her high-technology job and started a new company, Ittavi. Its product, SupportPay, is an online service that offers calendaring, schedule management, third-party payment systems and tax-management software for divorced people.

Written by Cathy Meyer for DivorcedMoms.com
Yes, I said divorce can be better than Christmas morning. Sometimes even better than sex, or better than sex with your ex.

For some of you, those who are experiencing an unwanted divorce, it will take time to appreciate the many possible virtues of divorce. For those of you who initiated the divorce, you may get it right now.

I had divorce forced upon me. I went through my fair share of heartache and anger and I learned eventually that there were things I didn’t know until the process was behind me and I was living, breathing and experiencing the person I became after that unwanted divorce. Here is my list of five reasons divorce can be better than Christmas morning:

Divorcé's Guide to Marriage

Study Reveals Five Common Themes Underlie Most Divorces

From The Wall Street Journal

Want great marriage advice? Ask a divorced person.

People who lose the most important relationship of their life tend to spend some time thinking about what went wrong. If they are at all self-reflective, this means they will acknowledge their own mistakes, not just their ex's blunders. And if they want to be lucky in love next time, they'll try to learn from these mistakes.

Research shows that most divorced people identify the same top five regrets—behaviors they believe contributed to their marriage's demise and that they resolve to change next time.

Another shooting, another son of divorce. From Adam Lanza, who killed 26 children and adults a year ago at Sandy Hook School in Newtown, Conn., to Karl Pierson, who shot a teenage girl and killed himself this past Friday at Arapahoe High in Centennial, Colo., one common and largely unremarked thread tying together most of the school shooters that have struck the nation in the last year is that they came from homes marked by divorce or an absent father. From shootings at MIT (i.e., the Tsarnaev brothers) to the University of Central Florida to the Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy in Decatur, Ga., nearly every shooting over the last year in Wikipedia’s “list of U.S. school attacks” involved a young man whose parents divorced or never married in the first place.